The Idealist vs. Materialist Lacan
pp. 95-6: The paradoxical stakes of our strategy are now becoming somewhat clearer: precisely in so far as our aim is to elevate Lacan to the dignity of an author who provides the key to the Grundoperation of German Idealism, perhaps the acme of the entire history of philosophy, our main opponent is a typical 'philosophical' reading of Lacan, a doxa on Lacan which reduces his teaching to the framework of traditional philosophy. Far from being a simple case of a false reading, this doxa definitely has support in Lacan: Lacan himself often yields to its temptation, since this doxa is a kind of 'spontaneous philosophy of (Lacanian) psychoanalysis'. What, then, are its basic contours?
The moment we enter the symbolic order, the immediacy of the pre-symbolic Real is lost for ever, the true object of desire ('mother') becomes impossible-unattainable. Every positive object we encounter in reality is already a substitute for this lost original, the incestuous Ding rendered inaccessible by the very fact of language--that is 'symbolic castration'. The very existence of man qua being-of-language stands thus under the sign of an irreducible and constitutive lack: we are submerged in the universe of signs which forever prevent us from attaining the Thing; so-called 'external reality' itself is already 'structured like a language', that is, its meaning is always-already overdetermined by the symbolic framework which structures our perception of reality. The symbolic agency of the paternal prohibition (the 'Name-of-the-Father') merely personifies, gives body to, the impossibility which is co-substantial with the very fact of the symbolic order--'jouissance is forbidden to him who speaks as such'.
This gap that forever separates the lost Thing from symbolic semblances which are never 'that' defines the contours of the ethics of desire: 'do not compromise your desire' can only mean 'do not put up with any of the substitutes for the Thing, keep the gap of desire open'. [....] the ethics of pure desire compels us to avoid not only debilitating contentment with the pleasures provided by the objects of phenomenal reality but also the danger of yielding to fascination with the Thing, and being drawn into its lethal vortex, which can only end in psychosis or suicidal passage a l'acte.
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p. 97: On a first approach, this reading of Lacan cannot but appear convincing, almost a matter of course--yet [....] To put it somewhat bluntly, we are dealing here with an 'idealist' distortion of Lacan; to this 'idealist' problematic of desire, its constitutive lack, and so on, one has to oppose the 'materialist' problematic of the Real of drives. That is to say, for Lacan the 'Real' is not, in the Kantian mode, a purely negative category, a designation of a limit without any specification of what lies beyond--the Real qua drive is, on the contrary, the agens, the 'driving force', of desiring.
This 'active' (and not purely negative) status of drives, of the pre-symbolic 'libido', induces Lacan to elaborate the highly Schellingian myth of 'lamella': in it, he deploys--in the form of a mythical narrative, not of a conceptual articulation--the 'real genesis', that is, what had to occur prior to symbolization, prior to the emergence of the symbolic order [footnote 6]. In short, Lacan's point here is that the passage from the radically 'impossible' Real (the maternal Thing-Body which can be apprehended only in a negative way) to the reign of the symbolic Law, to desire which is regulated by Law, sustained by the fundamental Prohibition, is not direct: something happens between 'pure', 'pre-human' nature and the order of symbolic exchanges, and this 'something' is precisely the Real of drives--no longer the 'closed circuit' of instincts and their innate rhythm of satisfaction (drives are already 'derailed nature'), but not yet the symbolic desire sustained by Prohibition. The Lacanian Thing is not simply the 'impossible' Real which withdraws into the dim recesses of the Unattainable with the entry of the symbolic order, it is the very universe of drives. Here, the reference to Schelling is of crucial importance, since Schelling was the first to accomplish an analogous step within the domain of philosophy: his mythical narrative on the 'ages of the world' focuses on a process in God which precedes the actuality of the divine Logos, and, as we have already seen, this process is described in terms which clearly pave the way for Lacan's notion of the Real of drives.
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pp. 173-4, [footnote 6]: On this Lacanian myth of lamella, see Chapter 3 of Slavoj Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative, Durham, NC: Duke University Press 1993. Incidentally, what we have just said in no way implies that the Real of drives is, in its ontological status, a kind of full substantiality, the positive 'stuff' of formal-symbolic structurations. What Lacan did with the notion of drive is strangely similar to what Einstein, in his general theory of relativity, did with the notion of gravity. Einstein 'desubstantialized' gravity by reducing it to geometry: gravity is not a substantial force which 'bends' space but the name for the curvature of space itself; in an analogous way, Lacan 'desubstantialized' drives: a drive is not a primordial positive force but a purely geometrical, topological phenomenon, the name for the curvature of the space of desire--for the paradox that, within this space, the way to attain the object (a) is not to go straight for it (the surest way to miss it) but to encircle it, to 'go round in circles'. Drive is this purely topological 'distortion' of the natural instinct which finds satisfaction in a direct consumption of its object.
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